On Saturday September 16th, Manchester SolFed took part in a demonstration organised by the Smash IPP campaign. Imprisonment for public protection (IPP) is a brutal system under which people find themselves rotting in prison for years without any idea of when they will be released. Under IPP, people as young as 16, after being given initial sentences of two years or less for petty crimes, such as theft of a mobile phone, still find themselves locked away in prison after as much as ten years or more later. As one IPP campaigner noted, being locked away in prison for year after year with no idea of when you will be released is nothing less than a form of mental torture. Needless to say, many prisoners serving IPP sentences suffer from mental health problems, reflected in the fact that a large number of IPP prisoners resort to self harm as a coping mechanism. The injustice of IPP was finally acknowledged by the government when it was abolished in 2012.

Brighton lettings agency MTM is facing a growing campaign by a group of tenants organising with Brighton SolFed for compensation after they paid £34,320 in rent to live in damp (pictured) and infested accommodation for a year. Recently, the landlady made a series of threats against the tenants. These include informing their places of study about the dispute, and attempting to get them blacklisted by agencies in the city and “all landlord associations in the country”. Regarding the former threat, we have informed the landlady that the tenants' places of study are already aware of the issues these tenants faced and have been sympathetic toward the situation.

Solfed locals have taken solidarity action to express our support of Uber drivers in Jakarta taking strike action today 11.9.2017. Similar actions have been taken by anarcho-syndicalists on 4 continents as a result of a call by the IWA-AIT. Solfed members in London held a picket outside Uber's UK headquarters in Aldgate. Brighton Solfed had previously expressed their solidarity while members in Liverpool and Manchester have been spreading the word about the struggle of Uber workers in Indonesia in a flyposting campaign.  Uber drivers, organising with the anarcho-syndicalist PPAS, are taking strike action, demanding higher pay and an end to highly casualised working conditions. These are the same problems faced by Uber drivers across the world - our solidarity is as international as their capital!

Brighton Solidarity Federation has started a dispute with MTM lettings on the Lewes road. A group of tenants have been organising with SolFed after they were rented a house with serious damp and mould problems, infestations, and poor furniture that the landlady had promised to replace.

The tenants were introduced to the landlady by a different letting agency in the city, which was intermittently involved in the tenancy for the first six months. Administration was then transferred to MTM. The first letting agency refunded the tenants their agency fees, totalling £1200, on Thursday 24th August, after a brief picket protesting against the agency for introducing the tenants to this poor-quality accommodation.  

Liverpool SolFed is organising a campaign against bad working conditions in the hospitality sector. The hospitality industry, which includes workplaces like pubs, restaurants, hotels, canteens, etc. has an important presence in the city and is well known for abuses and exploitation. Our aim is to get willing workers of the sector together to fight back against abuses and for better conditions.

On 31st July, members of Brighton Solidarity Federation, along with Bobby Carver and members of his campaign, met with Brighton & Hove City Council’s Executive Director for Neighbourhoods, Communities & Housing, Larissa Reed. You can read more about how this meeting came about here.

Prior to the meeting, ourselves and the Bobby Carver Campaign had issued three clear public demands to the council, which were based on Bobby’s – and others' – experience of the council’s housing department. The demands were as follows:

1. An end to at-a-distance housing suitability assessments
2. That third-party groups are allowed to attend these assessments
3. That any assessments that had exceeded the 8-week deadline were carried out within two weeks of the meeting

UPDATE: since the publication of this article on the afternoon of Monday 10th July 2017, Larissa Reed, Executive Director for Neighbourhoods, Communities & Housing at Brighton council has been in touch to arrange a meeting with Brighton SolFed and the Bobby Carver campaign within the next two weeks. We look forward to hearing how the issues raised below are going to be addressed, and about the changes the council is going to put in place to ensure 'the safest homes possible' for everyone...

A prospective tenant contacted Brighton SolFed after she was poorly treated by an agency. The list of grievances will be sadly familiar to anyone who has or does rent in Brighton. For example, after the agency had received the £840 fee for the four tenants moving into the house, they: changed the length of the agreement from twelve to eleven months; gave the tenants misleading information about insurance and tried to pressure them into more expensive agreements; made absurd requests for the paperwork required by their guarantor; added additional fees for this paperwork; forced expensive insurance schemes on international tenants; went back on a promise to fix up the bathroom; were generally unresponsive and misleading when they could be contacted, and moved the moving in date back whilst still expecting the tenants to pay rent from the first date.

We all know the old saying ‘if you don't vote, you can't complain’. A better one would be ‘ if all you do is vote, you can't complain’.

Dig a little deeper into the history books and what you find at the heart of change is direct action and organisation at a grassroots level. Everything from workers rights, women's rights, decent wages and even the right to vote itself have been gained this way, rulers typically resist change until they know they have no choice but to throw a few more crumbs to the people below.

At Easter, Liverpool-SolFed made a call out to protest against working conditions at Sandemans, a company who offers “Free Tours” in Liverpool and across Europe. “Free Tour” does not mean that guides are volunteers. In Sandeman’s case they are ‘self-employed workers’ and their incomes are based on the tips that are given at the end of the tour and out of those tips workers have to pay a variable amount of money per tourist to the company. This is, according to Sandemans, a “marketing fee”.